


Strong Coffee

by forgetthehorrorstory



Category: Twilight Series - Stephenie Meyer
Genre: F/M, Fix-It, Fluff and Angst, Friends to Lovers, One Shot, Post-New Moon, Twilight Team Jacob, i mean kinda it depends on your interpretation of the source material i guess, just so much angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-25
Updated: 2020-04-25
Packaged: 2021-03-02 02:47:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,740
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23843980
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/forgetthehorrorstory/pseuds/forgetthehorrorstory
Summary: "I'll choose him."That's what Bella said to Jacob in the woods. But when Edward asks Bella to marry him, she realizes she may have made the wrong decision. Is it too late to fix it?a sweet and angsty New Moon one shot.
Relationships: Jacob Black/Bella Swan
Comments: 9
Kudos: 129





	Strong Coffee

**Author's Note:**

> So I've been home doing nothing for like six weeks, and today we reached a new low: I spent approximately five hours feverishly writing twilight fanfiction. I haven't read the books in ten years, so it's probably completely off base on several counts. I can't even apologize for it, it just...is what it is, an unedited rush of feelings. If anyone else's broken brain is soothed by toothache-inducing jacob/bella in these trying times, please accept this gift from me.

“Edward asked me to marry him.”

I spoke the words to Jacob’s back. We were in his garage, just hours after our confrontation in the woods. He didn’t turn, but I saw his shoulders tense, watched his fingers pause over the tools he was organizing on his workbench.

“What was your answer?” he asked without turning around.

“I said...well, I said yes.”

Jacob took a deep, shuddering breath, and I watched the wolf ripple over his skin, threatening to settle. I didn’t move. I knew he could control it, and he did. A second later, he was solid again, and he finally turned to me.

“Congratulations,” he said flatly, and started walking toward the door.

“Wait, Jake, just--let me talk,” I said. “I promise, it isn’t what you think.”

He hovered there between the bench and the door, debating internally, but he never could deny me anything. He turned, arms crossed.

I swallowed. I hadn’t rehearsed any of this. How could I make Jacob understand? How could I show him without losing him forever?

“Jake, when he asked me, I was elated. I felt like my life was finally whole again--he was back, and he wanted me, and every beautiful dream I’d had over the past year felt real. It was one of the best feelings I’d ever had.”

“Jesus, if you’re just going to rub it in--”

“Jake, just listen--”

“I’m not sure I can take this, Bells,” he interrupted again, voice cracking. I looked into his face, and there was torment there, and sorrow, his arms pulled tight against his chest like they could protect him from the hurt. “Seriously, why are you here?”

I felt like an ass for starting the story this way, and I knew I was doing this all wrong, but all I could do now was forge on.

“He dropped me off at my house,” I continued, eyes filling with tears despite myself at the pain on Jacob’s face. “And as soon as I was in my room alone, and his car had disappeared, I suddenly started feeling...differently. I felt myself coming back, the person I was in the truck with you in the split second before we saw Carlisle’s car the other day. Before everything changed. Today, when I could no longer see Edward, or feel him, or smell him, those old feelings of abandonment, despair, of not being good enough for him? They all rushed back.” I watched his face to see if he was catching on to what I was trying to tell him, but he stood stock still, features blank.

“Because the thing is, Jake,” I continued, “When I’m around him, it’s like part of my brain shuts down. I can’t think properly. Maybe it’s part of the whole vampire thing, or maybe it’s just my own weakness, I don’t know. But I didn’t see that until he left me behind. I didn’t know love could look so different until I started spending time with you.” I was crying in earnest now, but I had no choice but to keep talking. “I know that if I ask you to tell me a memory of us, any one, you’ll tell me some ridiculously romantic story about some little moment I don’t even remember, but which demonstrates how much you’ve loved me, and for how long. I know that you love me for real reasons that have to do with who I am, and not because I’m some fascinating puzzle that broke through the monotony of listless centuries. I thought that the way Edward hovers over me, and follows me, and breaks every rule to be close to me--I thought that’s what real loving sacrifice looked like. But Jake, I think I was wrong.” I paused to take a breath, which ended up being more of a heaving sob, and I was already sinking to the dirt floor before I realized I was hyperventilating.

Jake was beside me in the time it took me to reach the ground, and he carried me to the old bench seat that served as his couch. I leaned back, closing my eyes, breathing in the scent of motor oil and food grease and the warm, earthy scent of Jacob. He let go of me as soon as I was settled and sat at the other end of the seat, shoulders pulled in like he was doing everything he could to put as much space between us as possible, and I felt all the healing fissures in my heart threaten to crack open into fresh wounds.

We sat in silence for what felt like minutes before Jacob suddenly spoke. “In the spring, you were taking that Shakespeare class,” he said, and I turned to him. He was studying his hands, rubbing his thumb along the rough calluses of his palm. “I was rebuilding the carb on one of the bikes, and you were reading out loud from your book, trying to study. I remember it took me three times as long to do what I was doing because I kept stopping to listen to you. Your voice, so peaceful and content in those few minutes, was the most beautiful thing I’d ever heard.” He shook his head. “I spent the night reading that play online and beating myself up about how your last boyfriend could probably quote the whole thing to you by memory--hell, now that I think about it, his dad was probably there at opening night in sixteen hundred-whatever. And I thought about how I could barely understand the words. But I just heard them in your voice, and suddenly they were beautiful again. And I realized there was no one else I’d rather listen to, forever.” He glanced over at me, eyes darting quickly to my face and then away again. “You feeling a little better?”

“My friends were poor, but honest; so’s my love,” I said haltingly, glad for once I’d had to memorize it for an oral report. “Be not offended, for it hurts not him / That he is lov’d of me: I follow him not / By any token of presumptuous suit; / Nor would I have him till I do deserve him; / Yet never know how that desert should be.”

Jacob let out a long breath. “Yeah,” he murmured. “That.”

“Jake, I…” I swallowed against the lump in my throat, hating how small and weak I sounded. Over and over, I’d told him that my love for Edward was as inescapable as the tide, as ironclad and inevitable as the sun rising each morning. Every beautiful thing Jacob had said to me, every memory he’d tucked away was in vain--that’s what I’d told him, with my words and my actions. I’d believed it with every fiber of my being, until suddenly one day I realized I didn’t believe it anymore. How could I make him understand, when I barely understood myself?

“I don’t know if I can say it,” I said finally.

“Bella, I am begging you,” he said. “I don’t care what it does to me. Please just tell me.”

I ached to reassure him, but I had to tell this story, had to make him see it all. So I went on.

“When I was finally alone, for the first time since the Cullens came back into my life, I realized that the girl I am today is not the same girl they left. I’d learned something new while they were gone.”

I paused to collect myself, and Jacob asked softly, "And what was that?”

I reached out a trembling hand to brush his cheek, and he closed his eyes, leaning into my touch. The tension he felt, and the fear, was evident in his face.

“I learned that love doesn’t have to feel like being on some incredible drug. Love can feel like...like strong coffee. It can wake you up, help you see clearly. Or it can be like a crackling fireplace at the end of a long day, welcoming you home. It can be warmth and safety. And it can grow, and change--it doesn’t have to be frozen at the razor's edge of youth so that it doesn’t wither.” I’d scooted closer to him as I talked, relishing the heat radiating from him. I was close enough to feel his thunderous heartbeat, the slow, shallow breaths he was taking, like he was doing everything in his power not to scare me away. I tucked myself against him and his arms sank around me, one around my shoulders, the other pressed to the small of my back. For the first time since I walked into the garage, I felt hope--that maybe, just maybe, I hadn't lost him.

“I know how hard it was for you to see me hurting so much for him. But I know you weren’t just biding your time, waiting for me to be over it, no matter what wolf bullshit you said when you were upset. I know, through it all, that you were my friend, and you would still be my friend even if I came through that door and told you I was getting married.”

“To be fair,” Jacob said carefully, “You did come through that door and tell me you were getting married.”

“I told you he asked me,” I said. “I still haven’t gotten to the rest.” Jake cocked an eyebrow at me, bidding me to continue.

“So I paced around my room for a while, gearing myself up, knowing I would have to hang onto my real thoughts and feelings even when he was in the room. And then I called and asked him to come back.” This hurt, no matter how sure I was that I’d done the right thing, and I took a shuddering breath. Jake’s arms tightened around me, and he stroked soothing circles into my side with the soft press of his fingers.

“He came back in almost immediately, because of course he was probably lingering just beneath my window, waiting for me. And I asked him to tell me what he loved about me. He looked confused, but he told me he loved how he could never quite figure me out--how I was so different than anyone he’d ever met, how I was so beautiful to him--”

“Is that how he said it?” Jacob asked abruptly. “Sorry, I don’t mean to interrupt, I just--he said that you’re beautiful to him? Like it’s a personality quirk of his or something, to find you beautiful?”

“I mean--those were his words, yeah. And when he was done, he smiled and opened his arms, waiting for me to come to him. But I just took off my ring and held it out in the space between us. I told him I couldn’t marry him, because I would never feel safe. Not physically--I do truly believe he would rather die than hurt me--but in myself, as I was. He’d left me, and the trust he’d taken with him was something I’d never get back, because the future he’d promised never felt real, not even at the start. The fact that it was so easy to accept him vanishing like that, like I'd deserved to be left--it meant something, and I never would have seen it if he hadn’t gone.” I looked up at Jacob to see what he was thinking, but he was staring off into space, face unreadable.

“Do you want to know what I would have said?” He asked finally. “If you’d asked me that question?”

My mouth went dry. “Okay,” I said.

Jake stood up, leaving the cool air of the garage to rush into the space he left. I pulled my arms tight around my knees and watched him as he opened an old trunk sitting in the corner of the room, a piece of furniture I’d sat on a hundred times when the real seats were covered in pizza boxes and machine parts. He pulled out stack after stack of books, movies, CDs, all of the spines as familiar as my own name, many plastered with library barcodes.

“ _The Bluest Eye_ ,” I said, recognizing it though it was too far away for me to read the title. “ _Great Expectations_. _Harry Potter_...wow, all seven of them.”

“It’s everything you mentioned you liked during those first few months, working on the bikes,” he said, self-consciously fiddling with the latch of the lid as he stood beside the trunk, its contents now in piles around him. “Every book, every movie. Every CD, even though you told me you didn’t like music. I caught you singing along when you weren’t paying attention, and saw the collection under the seat in the truck.” He met my eyes again, and this time neither of us glanced away. “I read it all, watched it all, listened to it all, in every moment that you weren’t here. I was desperate to know you, Bella, to understand what you loved and why. And I treasured those moments when your eyes would clear, just for a minute, as you told me about a scene in a book you particularly loved, and we could both pretend for that tiny moment that everything was OK. I thought maybe having someone to talk to about those things would help you feel a little less alone.”

“Jacob--” I breathed, but he shook his head.

“I’m not telling you this for a pat on the head, Bells. I’m not much of a reader, and I never got to the point where I could really keep up with you, so I never brought it up. But every second of effort was worth it, because one time we were at the convenience store and I made a joke about how the cashier was a real Ignatius J. Reilly--hoping against hope I’d actually pronounced it right--and you smiled. It was a big, open, for-real smile, and you laughed a little bit, and I felt warm inside for days.” He left the piles where they were and came back to me, kneeling in front of me on the ground, his forehead pressed to my knees.

“I love you because you ask how Billy is doing every single day, no matter what,” he said, the words so soft I leaned down to hear him, my head pressed to his. “And because you know what it’s like to be the person who sticks around to make sure your dad is alright. I love you because you keep a bottle of antiseptic in your purse just in case I show up with some scrape from the woods, even though you know I’ll just heal in a few minutes anyway. I love that you watched all the Star Wars movies with me, even though you fell asleep on my shoulder during every single one. I love that when you told me this whole story, just now, you used about ten words I’d never heard before in my life like they were just normal parts of speech. I love that you asked Billy and Emily to send you recipes for my favorite foods, and for my birthday you made that God-awful banana bread in that heart-shaped pan--”

“I told you, the oven stopped working halfway through,” I broke in, laughing even though my voice was thick with tears. I sat up, and Jake tilted his head to look up at me from the ground, and I realized he was crying, too.

“I love you because you’re dorky, and selfless, and curious, and you have been for our entire lives. I’ve loved you since I was six years old and you braided my hair for the first time and told me I was even better than your Barbie doll.”

“Did I really?” I asked, wrinkling my nose.

“Yeah,” he laughed softly, “you did.” But after a moment, his smile faded.

“Bells,” he said, “I’m sorry to harp on it, but I need to hear you say it. I can’t...I can’t live in this grey area anymore. I need you to finish what you came here to say.”

I shut my eyes and took a deep breath.

“Jake, I lied to you earlier today, when I said that if you made me choose, I’d choose him. Or--well, I didn’t think I was lying, not really, but it felt wrong when it came out of my mouth. It was exactly the kind of thing I would have said before he left, but it didn’t seem right anymore.” Jake was still kneeling, staring up at me with his warm brown eyes. I took his face in my hands, brushing his cheekbones with my thumb, feeling his pulse strong and steady beneath my fingertips.

“Jake, you’re my home,” I let my voice break over the words, not caring how desperate I sounded, no longer scared of wanting it too much. “You’re coffee, you’re fire, you’re everything.”

“Bella, I need to know--I need to know that you’re mine.” The words cracked with emotion and seemed to surprise him as they came out. He turned away from me, looking nervously at the floor.

“Jake,” I said, surprised at the fierce surety in my voice, “I’m _mine_. Finally, after so much time feeling certain that I belonged to somebody else, I’m back in my own body again. And every broken shard I’ve gotten back, I got with your help. I’m telling you that I choose you, Jacob. I’m finally myself, and every piece of me wants you so much--”

He surged toward me in one fluid motion, pressing me gently back into the seat, my legs on either side of his torso. “You choose me,” he murmured against my neck, and my heart stuttered as he pressed his lips to the curve of my jaw. “And you want me.”

“No need to be so--self-satisfied,” I said, the words coming out in a pant. He laughed, and I felt his breath against my throat.

“I’m just trying to wrap my mind around how I got so goddamn lucky,” he said, his nose brushing against my earlobe as he kissed my jaw, my temple, the hollow of my throat. Finally, I turned my head and caught his lips with mine. And for the first time, I kissed someone who kissed me back in earnest, his arms pressing in close where they supported his weight on either side of me, his chest pressed hard against mine--

I felt his growl more than I heard it, the rumble in his bare chest evident where his skin touched mine. I broke away from the kiss, trying in vain to put some space between us.

“I’m sorry,” I said breathlessly. “I shouldn’t have--it was too much--”

“What? Bella, hey,” Jacob said, rolling off to the side to give me a little space. “Everything is OK. Better than OK, actually.” He looked ruefully at the ceiling, raking a hand through his hair. “This is--this is everything I have ever wanted, seriously. I’m sorry if I got a little, uh, overexcited.”

“I just don’t want to do anything that could cause you to lose control,” I said, straightening my shirt self-consciously. Jacob didn’t say anything for a long moment. When I looked up at him, the expression on his face was so heartbroken I immediately reached for him.

“What is it? What did I--”

“Bella, stop. You don't have anything to apologize for,” he said, grabbing my hands and holding them tightly. “I just need you to hear this before we go any further, OK?”

“OK,” I agreed, uncertain.

“Kissing you, being with you is--it isn’t torture, OK? Let’s just say that.” The corner of his mouth quirked upward. “I swear to you, I will never, ever hurt you. I will never lose control like that. It’s just not going to happen. The only danger is that I won’t ever be able to stop kissing you, and we’ll fail out of school.”

“How can you be so sure?” I asked.

“Well, first, we only turn when we can’t control our anger. Not...other feelings.” His ears turned pink, and he smiled that adorable, embarrassed smile again. “And second, it won’t matter if we have the worst fight ever, or if you...if you leave me, or anything. We’ve been talking about choices, right? I made that choice ages ago. Maybe when I first turned, it would have been a challenge, no matter how hard I worked to control it. But now I can make this promise to you, Bella, OK? You don’t have to worry.”

“But what about Sam and Emily?” I asked. “You said--”

“I know. And I’m telling you now that I was wrong. I said it because I knew I was capable of it too, back then, and I wanted to believe Sam had no chance to stop himself.” Jacob took a deep breath, and I squeezed his hand, still enclosed around mine. “But as horrible as it is to admit, I know now that we always have a choice, Bella. That what happened to Emily was a horrible, awful mistake, something Sam can never make right, and something she didn’t have to forgive. But it’s not...the wolf isn’t some alien part of me. It is me, and I am telling you that I will never, never hurt you. And that kissing you, being this close to you, it’s...a lot. In a good way. And it will never, ever be too much, and you never have to apologize, OK?”

He leaned forward then, kissing me softly, hands hovering tentatively near my waist I smiled against his mouth and pulled him closer, laying back on the seat. He never stopped kissing me as he shifted his weight, his legs between mine as he lay over me. I arched into him, asking him wordlessly for more, more, more. He pressed closer, our bodies flush against each other, and he kissed me harder, tongue tracing the curve of my lower lip. I moaned softly and reached my hands up to tangle in the hair at the base of his neck.

“I love you, Bella,” he breathed against my cheek, kissing his way from my jaw, to my neck, to my collarbone. “It’s always been you.”

“I love you, Jacob,” I said, and then words left me.


End file.
